The blog aggregates news about publications, activities, etc. related to Egyptian/Arabic scholarship in the field of Greco-Roman studies and thus seeks to challenge the Eurocentrism prevalent in the field. It aims also at directing the attention to relevant materials from modern nonacademic/public contexts; roughly from 1798-to the present. The news comes mainly from Egypt without excluding other Arabic countries.
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Wednesday, March 1, 2017
Classical Papers' new cover to a new issue (2017)
Saturday, February 25, 2017
Google Machine Translation
[Retrieved https://research.google.com/on 25.2.2017]
Machine Translation
Machine Translation is a great example of how cutting edge research and world class infrastructure come together at Google. We focus our research efforts towards developing statistical translation techniques that improve with more data and generalize well to new languages. Our large scale computing infrastructure allows us to rapidly experiment with new models trained on web-scale data to significantly improve translation quality. This research backs the translations served at translate.google.com, allowing our users to translate text, web pages and even speech. Deployed within a wide range of Google services like GMail, Books, Android and web search, Google Translate is a high impact, research driven product that bridges the language barrier and makes it possible to explore the multilingual web in 90 languages. Exciting research challenges abound as we pursue human quality translation and develop machine translation systems for new languages.
43 Publications
Neural Machine Translation
[Retrieved from https://arxiv.org/abs/1609.08144 on 25.02.2017]
Google's Neural Machine Translation System: Bridging the Gap between Human and Machine Translation
Yonghui Wu, Mike Schuster, Zhifeng Chen, Quoc V. Le, Mohammad Norouzi, Wolfgang Macherey, Maxim Krikun, Yuan Cao, Qin Gao, Klaus Macherey, Jeff Klingner, Apurva Shah, Melvin Johnson, Xiaobing Liu, Łukasz Kaiser, Stephan Gouws, Yoshikiyo Kato, Taku Kudo, Hideto Kazawa, Keith Stevens, George Kurian, Nishant Patil, Wei Wang, Cliff Young, Jason Smith, Jason Riesa, Alex Rudnick, Oriol Vinyals, Greg Corrado, Macduff Hughes, Jeffrey Dean
(Submitted on 26 Sep 2016 (v1), last revised 8 Oct 2016 (this version, v2))
Neural Machine Translation (NMT) is an end-to-end learning approach for automated translation, with the potential to overcome many of the weaknesses of conventional phrase-based translation systems. Unfortunately, NMT systems are known to be computationally expensive both in training and in translation inference. Also, most NMT systems have difficulty with rare words. These issues have hindered NMT's use in practical deployments and services, where both accuracy and speed are essential. In this work, we present GNMT, Google's Neural Machine Translation system, which attempts to address many of these issues. Our model consists of a deep LSTM network with 8 encoder and 8 decoder layers using attention and residual connections. To improve parallelism and therefore decrease training time, our attention mechanism connects the bottom layer of the decoder to the top layer of the encoder. To accelerate the final translation speed, we employ low-precision arithmetic during inference computations. To improve handling of rare words, we divide words into a limited set of common sub-word units ("wordpieces") for both input and output. This method provides a good balance between the flexibility of "character"-delimited models and the efficiency of "word"-delimited models, naturally handles translation of rare words, and ultimately improves the overall accuracy of the system. Our beam search technique employs a length-normalization procedure and uses a coverage penalty, which encourages generation of an output sentence that is most likely to cover all the words in the source sentence. On the WMT'14 English-to-French and English-to-German benchmarks, GNMT achieves competitive results to state-of-the-art. Using a human side-by-side evaluation on a set of isolated simple sentences, it reduces translation errors by an average of 60% compared to Google's phrase-based production system.
Subjects:Computation and Language (cs.CL); Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI); Learning (cs.LG)
Cite as:arXiv:1609.08144 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:1609.08144v2 [cs.CL] for this version)
Submission history
From: Mike Schuster [view email]
[v1] Mon, 26 Sep 2016 19:59:55 GMT (969kb,D)
[v2] Sat, 8 Oct 2016 19:10:41 GMT (968kb,D)
Which authors of this paper are endorsers? | Disable MathJax (What is MathJax?)
Link back to: arXiv, form interface, contact.
Wednesday, February 22, 2017
The Classical Language Toolkit (CLTK)
http://cltk.org/
Goals
- compile analysis-friendly corpora;
- collect and generate linguistic data;
- act as a free and open platform for generating scientific research.
Academic Advisors
- Neil Coffee, University at Buffalo (Associate Professor of Classics); Tesserae (Principal Investigator)
- Gregory Crane, Universität Leipzig (Humboldt Chair of Digital Humanities), Tufts University (Professor of Classics); Perseus (Editor–in–Chief) and Open Philology (Director)
- Peter Meineck, New York University (Associate Professor of Classics); Aquila Theatre (Founder), Ancient Greeks/Modern Lives (Founder, Director)
- Leonard Muellner, Brandeis University (Professor Emeritus of Classical Studies); Center for Hellenic Studies (Director of Publications, Information Technology and Libraries)
Hunayn b. Ishaq - ܚܘܢܝܢ ܒܪ ܐܝܣܚܩ(808 - 873)
Identity from syriaca.org
James E. Walters et al., “Hunayn b. Ishaq — ܚܘܢܝܢ ܒܪ ܐܝܣܚܩ ” in A Guide to Syriac Authors, eds. David A. Michelson and Nathan P. Gibson, entry published August 17, 2016, Syriaca.org: The Syriac Reference Portal, ed. David A. Michelson. http://syriaca.org/person/542.
"Physician, philosopher, theologian, and translator. His full name is Abū Zayd Ḥunayn b. Isḥāq b. Sulaymān b. Ayyūb al-ʿIbādī, and he was known in medieval Europe as Johannitius.”
Syriaca.org
From the website of the project [retrieved 22.2.2017]
What is Syriaca.org?
Saturday, February 4, 2017
Illicit Trade in Papyri: How It Works?
Three golden ushabti !
A mummy !
Illicit Trade in Papyri: How It Works?
Friday, January 6, 2017
Anastas Al-Karmali ( the Carmelite) on Youtube
Anastas Al-Karmali (Arabic: أنستاس الكرملي), literally Anastas the Carmelite aka Père Anastase-Marie de Saint-Élie (5 August 1866 – January 7, 1947) was a Lebanese Christian priest, most famed for his contributions to the field of Arabic linguistics.
His biography in Youtube:
Monday, December 12, 2016
Sunday, December 4, 2016
Manchester's PhD Funding Opportunities in Classics & Ancient Historyمنحة دكتوراة فى علم البردي
PhD opportunities at Manchester.
Sent: 02 December 2016 09:39
To: CLASSICISTS@liverpool.ac.uk
Subject: PhD Funding Opportunities in Classics & Ancient History, University of Manchester
- AHRC studentships through the North-West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership (NWC DTP; see the North West Consortium Doctoral Training Partnership). Please note that this scheme allows for joint supervision between institutions which are members of the relevant 'pathway' in the consortium: members of the Classics & Ancient History pathway are the University of Liverpool, Manchester Metropolitan University, and the University of Manchester. If you would like to explore this option, please contact, in the first instance, the institution at which you plan to base your PhD.
- President’s Doctoral Scholarships: for Home/EU/International tuition fees, plus a maintenance stipend (equivalent to the RCUK stipend).
- School awards: for Home/EU/International tuition fees, plus a maintenance stipend (equivalent to the RCUK stipend).
- The Department of Classics & Ancient History is also pleased to invite applications for the Lees Scholarship, for PhD research in the field of Latin (including literary, historical, philosophical and linguistic topics); this award covers Home/EU tuition fees for up to three years.
Potential applicants to our PhD programme should consult their prospective supervisor as soon as possible, or contact our Postgraduate Research Officer (polly.low@manchester.ac.uk), who is always happy to discuss potential applications, to answer specific queries about the application process, and to arrange visits to the Department.
- Postgraduate funding (main University website with non-subject specific funding opportunities)
- Funding for postgraduate research students in SALC (School of Arts, Languages and Cultures funding opportunities)
Saturday, August 20, 2016
Multilingualism in the Graeco-Roman Worlds, ed. by Alex Mullen and Patrick James, Cambridge University Press 2012
Greek Language and Education Under Early Islam, Maria Mavroudi 2014
Manuscript of Sughrat (Socrates) belongs to a 13th century Seljuk illustrator. It is currently kept at Topkapi Palace Library, Istanbul, Turkey |
Friday, August 19, 2016
Kitto's the Greeks (1951) into Arabic
Two New Editions of the Arabic Translation of Aristotle's Politics
Nicomachean Ethics from the French (of Barthélemy-Saint-Hilaire, Morale d'Aristote 1856) into Arabic
Βάτραχοι (The frogs) of Aristophanes into Arabic by Abdelmoety Sharawy (2011)
Thursday, August 18, 2016
H. Idris Bell's Egypt, from Alexander the Great to the Arab conquest (1948, Oxford, at the Clarendon Press) into Arabic
Wednesday, August 17, 2016
Alexander the great, a play by Mustafa Mahmoud
Ovid's Amores into Arabic
He has also give us an image of the book cover and a beautiful excerpt of the translation; Ov. Am. 1.9-15
10 Mirabar, tenebris quisquis iturus erat.
Risit, ut audirem, tenera cum matre Cupido
Et leviter 'fies tu quoque fortis' ait.
Nec mora, venit amor — non umbras nocte volantis,
Non timeo strictas in mea fata manus.
15 Te nimium lentum timeo ...
The Classical legacy in Tawfiq al-Hakim's Drama
Tuesday, August 16, 2016
Chevening Scholarships Programme for 2017/2018 is now open
Chevening Scholarships Programme for 2017/2018 is now open with two significant updates;
ü Firstly, Tuition is not capped
ü And secondly, scholarship covers all fields of study in any UK university.
Chevening Scholarships offer the opportunity to study for a one-year Master’s degree in any subject at any UK universities, and are awarded to outstanding established or emerging leaders across a wide range of fields.
Applications for a Chevening Scholarship must be submitted online at www.chevening.org and the deadline for receipt of applications is 8 November at 23.59 GMT. Applicants should read the online guidance and demonstrate how they meet the Chevening selection criteria before submitting an application.
To be eligible for a Chevening Scholarship, the applicant must: ·
Be an Egyptian citizen, and intend to return to Egypt after completion of his/her studies ·
Hold a BA degree ·
Have completed at least two years’ work or equivalent experience before applying for a Chevening Scholarship ·
Be able to meet the Chevening minimum English language requirement ·
Be able to receive an unconditional offer from a UK university .
Please feel free to forward and pass the Chevening announcement to your contacts and networks who may be interested to apply to help find those talented young Egyptian professionals who can make use of these opportunities!
The announcement is now the Chevening facebook pages: https://www.facebook.com/officialchevening
Saturday, August 13, 2016
Contesting Antiquity in Egypt, AUC press 2015 by Donald Malcolm Reid
Classical Reception Studies: Reconceptualizing the Study of the Classical Tradition by Maarten De Pourcq
Full papers in academia.edu
Classical Reception Studies: Reconceptualizing the Study of the Classical Tradition
Maarten De Pourcq
https://www.academia.edu/2386554/Classical_Reception_Studies_Reconceptualizing_the_Study_of_the_Classical_Tradition
Classics in Post-Colonial Worlds, by Lorna Hardwick and Carol Gillespie, 2007
ABSTRACT [ from Oxford Scholarship Online]
Classical material was traditionally used to express colonial authority, but it was also appropriated by imperial subjects to become first a means of challenging colonialism, and then a rich field for creating cultural identities which blend the old and the new. Nobel prize winners such as Derek Walcott and Seamus Heaney have rewritten classical material in their own cultural idioms, while public sculpture in southern Africa draws on Greek and Roman motifs in order to represent histories of African resistance and liberation. These developments are explored in this collection of essays by scholars who debate the relationship between the culture of Greece and Rome, and the changes that have followed the end of colonial empires.
http://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199296101.001.0001/acprof-9780199296101
Classics and colonialism by Barbara Goff (2005)
This collection of well-focussed essays is the first to examine explicitly the role played by the literature and culture of classical antiquity in the various discourses that established, maintained or undermined the British empire. Drawing on reception studies and postcolonial studies, the contributors investigate topics such as the intersections among nineteenth- and twentieth-century theories of the Greek, Roman and British empires, the place of neo-classical poetry and classical education in the Caribbean, and adaptations of Greek drama by postcolonial writers in Africa and elsewhere. There is a substantial introduction that discusses the role of classics within the British empire, why it should compel our attention and how it might provide fruitful ground for further enquiry. The emphasis throughout is on the diverse ways in which the classical tradition has been used both by those who identified themselves with imperialist goals and by those engaged in struggle against imperialism. - See more at: http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/classics-and-colonialism-9780715633113/#sthash.CZWmG4IV.dpuf
http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/classics-and-colonialism-9780715633113/
Friday, August 12, 2016
CALCS Project: : including Arabic names in the Greco-Roman atlas
Gabriel BODARD, in Pelagios Commons on
With thanks to the Pelagios Commons team and especially the expert and generous SIG chairs, we’re happy to announce the CALCS Project has been funded with a small development grant. The aim of this project—which serves as a pilot for a much larger investigation into the afterlives of sites we think of as classical—is to add information about mediaeval Arabic and Ottoman, and modern Arabic and Turkish, names to sites in Pleiades.
The Pleiades Gazetteer, probably the most useful authority of any kind of the Ancient and Late Antique Linked Web, as Pelagios collaborators do not need reminding, is based on the Barrington Atlas of the Greek and Roman World, the most definitive print atlas of classical antiquity. Although constantly under improvement, Pleiades is already as close to a comprehensive list of known Greco-Roman places and names as we have ever had. The majority of names in the gazetteer are those in use in Anglo-Saxon classical scholarship: either the classical names that were in the atlas (Colonia Claudia Ara Agrippinensium; αἱ Ἀθῆναι), or the English/Italian rendering of a modern or other variant place name (Naples, Cirene).
Thursday, May 12, 2016
Aeneas in Palestine: How the Israeli-Palestinian conflict makes sense of Virgil’s Aeneid
Tuesday, May 10, 2016
Gregory Crane: Greek, Latin and Digital Philology in a Global Age
Greek, Latin and Digital Philology in a Global Age
Greek, Latin and Digital Philology in a Global Age
ST Lee Professorial Fellow Lectures
Spring 2016
Alexander von Humboldt Professor of Digital Humanities
University of Leipzig
Winnick Family Chair of Technology and Entrepreneurship
Tufts University
Sunday, May 1, 2016
P. ÄkNo 1 and 2: purchased in 2011, extracted from mummy cartonnage and of unknown provenance
Two Hellenistic Medical Papyri of the Ärztekammer Nordrhein (P. ÄkNo 1 and 2) edited by Isabella Andorlini and Robert Walter Daniel, x + 153 pp. + 4 plates, Abhandlungen der Nordrhein-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste, Sonderreihe Papyrologica Coloniensia, Vol. XXXVIII, Schöningh Verlag, 2016.
Monday, April 18, 2016
Traianos Gagos Fund for Papyrology: 2016 Call
Mon, Apr 18, 2016 at 2:37 PM
Traianos Gagos Fund for Papyrology: 2016 Call
|
The Fund can be used to help students (graduate and undergraduate) as well as recent recipients of the PhD (within three years of the degree) to use the resources of the University of Michigan Papyrus Collection. Funds may be used to visit Michigan and work with the collection; travel to conferences to present work based on the collection; or travel to other collections relevant to Michigan papyri.
The Department of Classical Studies is inviting applications for use of this fund for 2016. Awards from this Fund will be no more than $2,000 total. The application should consist of:
1) A narrative description of the intended use of the grant
2) A detailed budget
3) Current curriculum vitae
4) One letter of recommendation
Applications must be submitted as email attachments to classics@umich.edu. The subject line of the email should read as follows: “Application for 2016 Traianos Gagos Fund.” Applications are due at 5:00 pm Eastern Time on May 20, 2016.
Tuesday, March 29, 2016
Khaled El-Enany is Egypt's New Minsiter of Antiquities
IFAO Active Archeological Missions
Monday, March 28, 2016
Cairo Papyri Checklist
Eurocentrism again: The case of Sappho Papyrus
It is really a very hard and critical question in the same time, not only because these information is hard to get, but also because in this moment the editor/s is/are confronted with the question “should I publish this piece, whose provenance/provenience unknown/uncertain or simply to ignore it as well as the text/significance it bears?”. I know that this question, in case the artifact offered to you contains an unknown text or a new discovery, appears to be hard to be answered by some scholars, but for others, who knows how we suffer, not only economically but also culturally, from looting and illegal excavations, a simple “no, I will not be involved in such trade/uncertainties.” ends the dilemma. The case of Sappho papyrus is still not closed and many questions about its acquisition are still open. Yes we may be much clearer now about many details concerning its provenance, thanks off course to the editor who provided us with more details about is provenance, than what was provided in its first edition in the ZPE (to know what we have learned so far about the acquisition history of this particular piece see Roberta Mazza summary and comments here: http://tinyurl.com/hlsgd3b), but my main concern here, as stated above, is the general question of the time of its discovery (2011) and its connection what is going now in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab World and consequently in the whole world.